Putin’s Power and the Late Great United States

After a suicide bombing in the Moscow subway by a Muslim terrorist, Vladimir Putin said, “Russia doesn’t conduct negotiations with terrorists — it destroys them.”

The last American president to say something like that and mean it was Ronald Reagan, who also defeated Putin’s old bosses. The current administration, which frees Taliban leaders and makes concessions to Iran for the sake of what it calls “Smart Power,” couldn’t defeat a wet paper bag.

Fresh from his serial humiliations of Obama on the NSA and Syria, Putin has risen to the top of Forbes’ Most Powerful People list. At No. 2 is Obama, right ahead of his banker and loan shark, Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.

Putin has trashed Obama’s national security and foreign policy with little leverage except a UN Security Council seat and bit players like Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden, who are a long way down from the powerful insiders like Alger Hiss and Kim Philby that his old bosses used to rely on.